Monday, June 12, 2017

Legend has it that in the Middle Ages, there was a feudal lord who ruled his fief with iron fist. Suddenly, one day he lost his mind and left his castle, got undressed and began to bathe in the public fountain of the fief, under the astonished eyes of all his vassals. Evidently, that was an act of madness, but he was still the feudal lord. The final result was that from then on in that fief, it was a normal act to bathe in the public fountain and those who did not do it were banished from the lands of the lord.

Therefore, the concept of normality is quite ambiguous. What some people consider normal, other people could consider it to be a real madness, and the other way around. Today in our look to the past we check our perception of "normal" in the world of cybersecurity.
A year ago we collected a survey conducted by Centrify to users from United States, Germany and United Kingdom. In that study, participants admitted that being victims of hacking is inevitable, while between 13% and 21% claimed that it was "definitely normal". In addition, the most reputable sectors were the financial and sanitary sectors...

It was a year ago when the hacking to the Democratic Party in the United States happened. Nowadays, hackings to elections or political parties are almost the order of the day, but at that moment they were not so much. The attack revealed information that compromised several militants of the party but did not affect their personal data. Who’s to blame? Someone who will be very familiar: the Russians.

Another news that we find quite normal is a conflict between North Korea against their southern brothers. A year ago we found out that the Communists had "raided" more than 140,000 computers in Seoul from 160 different companies. This translated into 40.000 defense documents of the South Koreans. However, the North Korean government said they had nothing to do with it. Should we believe them?.

Unfortunately, leaking and having millions of passwords exposed was a normal thing a year ago, and it still is. Back then, the affected one was the Verticalscope website, which suffered a hacking back in the "distant" February 2016, leaving 45 million passwords on the dark web. All those passwords belonged to social networks as well-known as Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace...

And last but not least, we also want to review the interview we conducted to Monica Valle, host and co-director of the television program "Mundo Hacker", which is broadcast on La 2 de TVE.

As we can see, normality is neither good nor bad nor stable. It is changing and it adapts to the trends that we are living. But that does not mean that normal is the best option. Nowadays, normal is suffering a hack or ending with your data encrypted. That's why we are glad to be a "weirdo" in this aspect.